High speed switches are more and more needed in sophisticated telecommunication networks. However, an important problem resides in the fact that huge investments which were already made should be preserved as much as possible. Therefore, it is desirable that high speed switching systems of the future will still allow the attachments to the existing communication links.
Another serious problem comes from the different physical locations of the attachment lines forming the network topology of a given industrial area. Indeed, it very often appears that line adapters are to be located or distributed at different physical areas of an industrial site. This strongly enhances the difficulties of connections of the different elements to the centralized switch core.
When the complexity of the switching architecture increases, involving more and more distributed elements, it appears more and more difficult to achieve the multicasting operations, that is to say the possibility of duplicating the data cells at every point of the switching architecture. It appears indeed highly desirable that, although the complexity of the switching system increases, the data cells remain duplicable at every node of the switching system.
Additionally, the switching system should obviously be capable of handling Asynchronous Transfer Mode (A.T.M.) line communications. One prior art high-speed switching system in detailed in the article entitled "A highly modular packet switch for Gb/s rates" by W. E. Denzel, et al, "XIV International Switching Symposium", Vol. 2, pages A8.3 et seq. (October 1992).